Translator Widget

sábado, 13 de outubro de 2012

Enzensberger’s Titanic: The Sinking of the German Left and the Aesthetics of Survival by Alsdair King

Hans Magnus enzensberger’s book-length poem Der Untergang der Titanic. Eine Komödie ((The Sinking of the Titanic. A Poem) on (The Sinking of the Titanic. appeared in the Federal Republic of Germany in autumn, 1978.1 A complex, multi-layered work, it juxtaposes three distinct temporalities, 1912, 1969 and 1977, and three separate locations, the ship, Cuba and West Berlin.

The verse epic draws on a wide range of documents and literary and popular cultural texts, as well as on semi-autobiographical episodes. Its aim, as indic­ated in flyers accompanying its initial publication, is both to reconstruct the disaster and simultaneously to reflect on enduring public fascination with nar­ratives of the Titanic, to explore the contemporary resonance of myths of catastrophe in the popular imagination, the ‘Untergang im Kopf’ (the ‘cata­strophe in our heads’), in the author’s terms.Titanic became an immediate literary bestseller and, at the same
time, a highly problematic text for literary critics and cultural commentators
on ac­count of its aesthetic complexity and also because of what many perceived
as its pessimistic stance towards the possibilities for radical social change.
Whilst some critics relished the mammoth challenge of tracing Enzensberger’s
sources, quotations and allusions, others accused the author of formalism,
cynicism, inconsistency and political resignation.

For the previous fifteen
years Enzensberger had occupied a prominent position in West Germany’s
political culture, becoming one of the brightest stars associated with the New
Left and the extra-parliamentary opposition. He had shot to fame in the late
1950s as an ‘angry young man’, a brilliant and bitter socially critical poet
seen by many as the successor to Brecht. By the mid-1960s his energies were
concentrated less and less frequently on poetry as he devoted himself to
political journalism and publishing. He set up the hugely influential political
journal Kursbuch, advocated the politicisation of the German public through
the use of reportage and documentary literature, published the
much-anthologised ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’ and fostered links
with theorists and radicals beyond Germany, not least Cuba, where he spent a year in 1969. In
the context of the general exhaustion of the student movement in the 1970s, and
the turn to political violence by groups such as the Rote Armee Fraktion,
Enzensberger was accused on the publication of Titanic of finding the right moment in the intellectual season to
jump from the train which he himself had set in motion. 2

In view of his subsequent publications in the 1980s, which
saw him again cause controversy by praising the everyday life practices of the Kleinbürger or petit-bourgeois and by celebrating West Germany’s
political ‘mediocrity’, Enzensberger’s Titanic
increasingly appears to document not only an ending of sorts, but also the
transition to a cultural-political perspective which has been of enduring
importance in his own writing. As such, it is a pivotal text in his prolific
career. In this context, Enzensberger’s Titanic acts as
a large-scale tex­tual project of an unusual kind.

It is, quite deliberately, a
confusing poetic labyrinth concerned not least with the production, circulation
and consump­tion of representations of catastrophe and also an understated
manifesto for a modest role for the critical intellectual in Germany. It
explores the personalimplications of the loss of faith in
utopian projects and the political
implications of the pleasures of aesthetic representation and of the everyday
life practices of the ordinary citizen.The Titanic project
is born out of concerns with historiography and facticity. Moreover, the
sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ ship has come to represent the foundering of
modernity, the liner figuring as a microcosm of society’s precari­ous
commitment to technological advance, and thus its sinking is fully part of
Enzensberger’s critique of technological ‘progress’.

His Titanic juxtaposes text­ual material from a diverse range of
sources, both to narrate the events leading up to the 1912 catastrophe and at
the same time to call into question the ‘authenticity’ of that, and all other,
narrations. Enzensberger provides no bibli­ography of sources consulted and
used, so the reader is cast adrift into a textual ocean, something which has
led at least one critic to suggest that the text itself acts as the iceberg in
rupturing reader expectations. And in fact the cover of the book depicts not
the ship but an iceberg. The actual catastrophe in 1912 is examined then using
what may well be eye-witness reports, passenger details, documents relating to
the ship’s technical specifications, a menu, all of which appear to be taken
from Walter Lord’s celebrated book, A Night to Remember.3Significantly, some details are occasionally quite
deliberately changed, such as the inaccurate length of the ship given by
Enzensberger. This complex inter- textual borrowing is supplemented with a
variety of related archival material, including quotations from German, English
and American popular song and descriptions of the narrator in Cuba watching the
1953 Twentieth Century Fox film, Titanic, directed by Jean Negulesco and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb.
However, Enzensberger’s textual borrowings are highly unpre­dictable. Although
there are references to Lord’s book, and to a variety of news wires sent on
April 15, 1912, he ignores a whole tradition of German cultural representations
of the Titanic, including a number of well-known German films on the
catastrophe. Instead, he includes quotations purporting to belong to an
earlier, lost, poem by Enzensberger

himself.4

Enzensberger’s
refusal to tell the reader ‘what really happened’, at least according to Lord’s
account, ties in with an overriding concern of the volume, namely to focus more
on the creative process of writing about the Titanic and on the Titanic’s
status as catastrophic myth in the popular imagination.5 The 33
cantos and 16 supplementary poems which comprise Enzensberger’s Titanicexplore the way (The Sinking of the Titanic. and related
fears of apocalypse have an enduring hold on the ‘social imaginary’ in an age
saturated with media information, with documentation, with fact.6 Enzensberger draws attention to the multiplicity of meanings the catastrophe
has for us in his 16th Canto, posi­tioned almost exactly halfway through the
volume:

(The Sinking of the Titanic.
proceeds according to plan.

It is copyrighted.It is 100% tax-deductible.It is a lucky bag for poets.It is further proof that the
teachings of Vladimir I. Lenin are correct.It will run next Sunday on Channel One as a spectator sportIt is better than nothing.It closes down in July for
holidays.It is ecologically sound.It shows the way to a better
future.It is Art.It creates new jobs.It is beginning to get on our nerves. It
isn’t anymore what it used to be.7

The
continual presence of the Titanic in the ‘social imaginary’, surfacing at
regular intervals in popular culture particularly, can be seen as the other
side of the eternal faith in progress, namely the enduring faith in impending
apoc­alypse and the related pleasure in the catastrophe as spectacle. In an
essay published in Kursbuch again in 1978,
Enzensberger argued that the idea of the apocalyptic catastrophe is essentially
a negative utopia. 8

In his ‘Two marginal comments on the End of the
World’, Enzensberger suggested that, despite the impetus given to it in
contemporary society by, among others, the emerging ecology movement in the
Federal Republic, apocalyptic thinking is a transhis- torical, enduring
phenomenon, typified by the continuing resonance of the Titanic disaster.
Importantly, apocalyptic thinking is not dismissed by Enzens­berger as
irrational, an attitude which he equates with an unreflexive commit­ment to
reason, history and progress exemplified by what he calls vaguely ‘the­oreticians
on the left’. He notes instead how the apocalypse belongs to and is produced by
a range of different discourses, how it is overdetermined with meaning given
its multitude of social positions and functions:

The
apocalypse belongs to our ideological hand-luggage. It is an aphrodisiac. It is
a nightmare. It is a commodity like any other.

It is, if you like, a metaphor
for the col­lapse of capitalism, which, as is well known, has been imminent for
over a hundred years. It confronts us in all possible figures and disguises, as
a finger raised in warning, and as a scientific prognosis, as a collective
fiction and as a sectarian wake-up call, as a product of the entertainment
industry, as a superstition, as a trivial myth, as a picture puzzle, as a kick,
a joke, a projection. It is omnipresent, but not real: a second reality, an
image we fashion for ourselves, a never-ending production of our imagination,
the catastrophe in our heads.9

Enzensberger argues that although the idea of the
apocalypse has always been part of the social unconscious, in contemporary society
it has lost its previous, theological, nature and today has more secular names:
‘police state, paranoia, bureaucracy, terror, economic crisis, arms race,
destruction of the environ- ment’.10 Having established that
apocalyptic thinking is itself a constant, a nec­essary myth, rather than a
forerunner to any actual catastrophe, he moves to a consideration of its
connection to utopian politics in general.

Part
of the strength and attraction of the body of utopian theory, running,
according to Enzensberger, from Babeuf to Bloch, was its claim to be able to
understand the course of history and to anticipate a more humane future.11 Enzensberger’s rejection of this teleological movement of history is a
conscious and deliberate rejection of cultural-political positions based on
Marxist theory:

. . .
our theorists, bound to the philosophical tradition of German Idealism, even
now refuse to admit what every passerby has long since understood: that there
is no ‘world spirit’; that we don’t know the laws of history; that even class
conflict is an ‘organic’ process which no avant-garde can consciously plan and
lead; that social, like natural, evolution has no subject and that therefore it
is unforeseeable; that when we act politi­cally, we therefore never achieve what
we set out to, but rather something very differ­ent, something which we
couldn’t even imagine, and that this is the reason underlying the crisis of all
positive utopias. 12

As his statement suggests, and the autobiographical
elements in The
Sinking of the Titanic confirm,
political action never turns out as hoped: one never achieves exactly what one
sets out to. This could lead to apocalyptic thinking, but for Enzensberger,
given the unknowability of the future, the terms ‘optim­ism’ and ‘pessimism’
are inadequate, merely ‘sticking plasters for leader writ­ers and
fortune-tellers’.13 What is needed is clear thinking and modesty,
rather than fear and confusion, in the face of uncertainty. This is a
provisional but nonetheless cheerful politics, a point from which the present
can be survived and the future negotiated, summed up in his final phrase, ‘then
we will see what happens’.14

Strategies
for surviving the loss of utopias are a major element in The Sinking of the
Titanic. There is a
semi-autobiographical thread in many cantos which parallels the events in
Enzensberger’s life between his long stay in Cuba and his subsequent return to
Berlin.

In several early cantos, the narrator, writing from Berlin in 1977, the
moment of the gloomy deutscher Herbst
(‘German Autumn’) when the state and its antagonists in the Rote Armee Fraktion
seemed locked in a hopeless political struggle, attempts to piece together
recollections of his time in Cuba in 1969 and fragments of a poem about the
Titanic, which he had begun there. The reader is led to believe that in this
early version of the Titanic poem,
written in the middle of revolutionary euphoria, the old capitalist class-
based society (symbolised by the liner) is about to hit the revolutionary
socialist iceberg. However, this utopian version of the poem never appeared.
The later Komödie (comedy) written in Berlin claims in its text to be a
reconstruction of the earlier version, which itself went missing (or sank!) in
a mailbag en route to Paris.15 What does surface, though, is the
Berlin model of (The Sinking of the Titanic. ,
written in 1977, which, with the benefit of hindsight, is able to look back at
a revolutionary experience just before it would turn sour. The narrator notes
how, although no one was thinking at the time of any kind of Untergang (sinking or demise), the hopes for a utopian future were
in vain:

It seemed to usas if something were close at hand,something for us to invent. We did not knowthat the party had finished long ago,and that all that was left was a matter

to be dealt with by the man from the World Bankand the comrade from State Security,exactly
like back home and in any other place.16

Striking
about the actual text of (The Sinking of the Titanic. is the way in which the conventional symbolic properties
of the iceberg and the liner are here re- versed.17

The euphoric
conversations in Cuba about revolution mirror the self­absorption of the
passengers on the Titanic, heading blindly towards the iceberg which will puncture
their vanities. The iceberg here figures as a symbol for the jagged forces of
experience on which all utopian plans, as En­zensberger argues, run aground.
The loss of faith in utopias, triggered by the narrator’s experiences in Cuba
and Berlin, is not necessarily the end of the nar­rator’s world but a
perspective from which he can explore the various ways that that loss is
survived.18 One way of coming to terms with the process of
inevitable, routine loss is to pin one’s faith on the apocalypse, the spectacular
ending. Enzensberger describes a figure who predicts the coming Day of
Reckoning while all around him people get on with the day-to-day business of
living:

And thus even now he feels,perched on the top of his barn and crowing away, that Doom,
howeverunpunctual, will always be a tranquilliser of sorts, a sweet
consolation for dull prospects, loss of hair, and wet feet.19

The
theme of loss is connected to Enzensberger’s focus on what endures. The sinking
of the Titanic does not mean the historical cessation of class conflict. In
several places, (The Sinking of the Titanic. suggests that what survives the disaster in 1912 is the enduring economic and
political inequality across different sec­tions of society. The poor and
powerless are always the first to suffer:

We
are in the same boat, all of us.But
he who is poor is the first to drown.20

What
survives the misguided revolutionary zeal in Cuba is the persistence of an
unequal economic and political order. This fact is recognised in the 29th
Canto, which suggests that there are no absolute endings ‘as if anything/ever
were to founder for good’.21 There are always traces which endure,
no matter what epochal changes seem to be taking place:

We believed in some sort of end then(What do you mean by “then”? 1912? 1917? ‘45? ‘68?)and hence in some sort of beginningBy
now we have come to realize that the dinner is going on.22

In the face of the loss of faith in utopias, and in the
persistence of inequalities, Enzensberger explores not resignation but different
ways of coming to terms with this condition. Two tactics of survival, of making
do in the aftermath of loss, deserve particular attention, namely a rejection
of grand theory in several cantos in favour of a celebration of ordinary ways
of living, and also a series of supplementary poems which reflect on the
processes and pleasures of aesthetic production.

The
French theorist, Michel de Certeau, makes a distinction between strategy and tactics which
is useful for understanding Enzensberger’s position here. Drawing on von Bülow’s
formulation that ‘strategy is the science of mili­tary movements outside of the
enemy’s field of vision; tactics within it’,23 (and that phrase
‘field of vision’ is pertinent given Enzensberger’s comments below on state
surveillance in the 1970s) de Certeau’s suggestive essays explore a range of tactics used by ordinary people in everyday situations which both
recognise the constraints imposed by the existing social conditions and yet
find momentary means of acting autonomously, of temporarily subverting the
established order. The aspect of (The Sinking of the Titanic.

which irritated many of Enzensberger’s contemporaries was
its disavowal of the usefulness of an oppositional political strategy able to challenge directly and with finality the existing
social order.

As the poem maintains, ‘the dinner is going on’, there is no
prospect of radical change. It is easy to see in the absence of strategy a form of political resignation, but that would be to
ignore the way that the poem sal­vages and celebrates the actions, the tactics, of the marginalised, not least with the inclusion of a
Titanic Toast about the fictional black subversive survivor, Shine.24 These marginal figures are significant, not because they are the locus for
lasting revolutionary change, but because occasionally, in different ways, they
are able to act in their own interests within the existing order. Enzens­berger
repeatedly contrasts political theorists and prophets, apocalyptic strate­gists
if you will, with ordinary people. In the supplementary poem, ‘Keeping Cool’,
Enzensberger juxtaposes a prophet and his followers, who warn the public about
the approaching apocalypse, with the rest of the population who carry on with
their ordinary business:

. . . We, of course, go on botheringabout our humdrum business, supposing the delugeto be something antediluvian, or elsean elaborate practical joke—while they, perchedon their respective lookouts, know exactly the momentWhen. They have returned their hire cars in good time,emptied
their Frigidaires and prepared their souls.25

The
passing of time proves them wrong about the end of the world and those whom
they had admonished watch as

[f]irst one, then another will slowly come down and join us
in the nether regions of routine, meeting the mockery of the commonplace . . ..26

The
distance even in the period in Havana between ordinary people and mis­guided
political theorists, who still believed in the emancipatory power of crit­ical
theory, is noted in the 9th Canto:

In the entrails of Havana,
you see, the ancient miserywent on rotting regardless, .
. . “The People” were queuing uppatiently for a pizza . . .
at the Nacional,on the hotel terrace facing
the sea, now just a fewforlorn old Trotskyites
lingered, exiles from Paris,feeling “sweetly subversive”,
tossing breadballsat each other, and stale
quotations from Engels and Freud.27

In complete
contrast is the positive portrayal of everyday pragmatism in the face of real
emergency. Enzensberger describes watching a news broadcast of an impending
volcanic disaster off Iceland, where the television spectacle came to a
premature end after an old man simply trained his hosepipe on the cascading
lava:

. . . thus postponing,

not forever perhaps, but for
the time being at least, the Decline of Western Civilization, which is why the
people of Heimaey, unless they have died since, continue to dwell unmolested by
cameras in their dapper white wooden houses, calmly watering in the afternoon

the lettuce in their gardens,
which, thanks to the blackened soil, has grown simply enormous, and for the
time being at least, fails to show any signs of impending disaster.28

The question arises of how Enzensberger, as a cultural
producer and crit­ical intellectual, is going to ‘survive’ the sinking of
utopian projects without a strategy. Several cantos question the possibility of
art’s usefulness as a strategic means of critical enlightenment. Just as
critical theory seems undermined by popular needs and concerns, art, too, can
offer no guarantees that it commun­icates the truth.29 Several poems
contribute to a debate about the legitimacy of the artist’s activity,30
not least four supplementary pieces on painters attempt­ing to represent
catastrophe.

There is a consistent equation of the activity of aesthetic
creation with the notions of forgery, falsification, concealment and play,
rather than with public enlightenment.

The painter of ‘Last Supper. Venetian.
Sixteenth Century’ is adamant that pleasure is the principle upon which all art
is based31 and pleads for his representation to be accepted with a
certain ludic licence instead of being forced to conform to what the critics
con­sider ‘authentic/verisimilar’.32 His paintings turn into games
of hide-and-seek with his interpreters—in one he paints a turtle into a picture
only to cover it up before the critics can see it, an important example of the
way that aesthetic production can recover something for the private sphere by
hiding what is important from the regulators. 33

Concealment becomes
for Enzensberger the tactic of the
artist forced to reveal, to clarify, to enlighten and to display. In a
little-known paper also presented in 1978, Enzensberger was unusually clear on
a theory of writing as a means, not of enlightenment or revelation, but as a
process of hiding, of resisting assimilation. In his speech on the subject of
‘Writing as a Disguise’, he considered the different ways that literature could
be an activity of concealment.The one I liked best, because it corresponds to what is,
and has been, a favourite notion of mine ever since I started writing, asked if
literature could not perhaps be con­sidered as a hiding-place.34In
a subsequent speech, he explained how he found talk about literature dis­turbing:I shut the door behind me, I
hide away. Yes, my friends, my poem is my hiding- place.35

The
activities of hiding and concealment, and the ability of the writer to adopt
disguises, are all means to thwart social attempts to classify, order, control
and assimilate:Writing is an attempt to
escape from social control, and this is precisely what makes it irresistible to
some of us.36

Irresistible too, to many readers—there is a legitimate and
welcome role for those readers who try to engage in the pleasures of reading
through a process of ‘productive anarchy’,37 rather than attempting
to categorise and furnish official interpretations.38 Literature as
concealment becomes tactically signifi­cant, moreover, in the context of
Enzensberger’s analysis of the sorry state of democracy in the Federal Republic
at this time, given the government’s allo­cation of massive resources to
support politically motivated surveillance and the introduction of a massive
new police database system.39

In fact, he argues that the obsession
of the government and the police with ‘security considerations’,40
with leaving no aspect of contemporary life beyond the technologies of surveillance
and with eliminating all possible disruptive elements, is the only current
utopian project.41

As
the artist in ‘Apocalypse. Umbrian Master, about 1490’ discovers, there is even
pleasure to be had in trying to represent doom, to paint the end of the world.
Despite fears of ageing and the growing awareness of his own mortality, he
finds rich satisfaction in his ability to surmount the technical difficulties
of composition and in the final completion of his masterpiece. 42

The
parallels between the act of aesthetic creation as pleasurable, even
life-enhancing, to the old artist here and also to the narrator of the whole Komödie of (The Sinking of the Titanic. , are unmistakable. The narrator, having constructed a
multi-layered work from the detritus of personal and political loss, from a
range of texts con­cerning the apocalypse, and drawing on art, popular culture,
and factual material relating to the demise of the Titanic, is the last figure
in the book. He is alive in the water, swimming on, making do, surviving. 43

Notes

1Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Der Untergang der Titanic.
Eine Komödie (Frankfurt am Main, 1978). All references
in this chapter are to Hans Magnus Enzensberger,The Sinking of the
Titanic: A Poem (translated by the
author, Manchester 1981). Further references are cited in the text by page
number.

3Walter Lord, A Night to Remember (New York, 1955). This book was reprinted on numer­ous
occasions, with several later editions carrying photographs and illustrations.
It has a strong claim to have influenced much of the subsequent popular
cultural interest in (The Sinking of the Titanic. .

5See Richard Howells,
‘And the band played on ...’, The Higher, April 24, i992, p. 17.

6See ‘The Titanic as symptom’, in Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of
Ideology (London, 1992), pp. 69-71.
Zizek notes how the impact of the sinking was immense because it was somehow expected and had been foretold in popular literary tales. Zizek
argues that the Zeitgeist proposed that a
certain age was coming to an end and (The Sinking of the Titanic. was seized upon
as symbolic proof.

15Given the complexities of this poem and the recurring theme
of art as concealment and falsification, it would be no surprise if the
references to an earlier verschollenes (lost)
man­uscript were another deliberate ruse by the author. See Bachler, ‘Der Untergang der Titanic’, pp. 90—92.

18See the supplementary
poem, ‘Notice of Loss’, (The Sinking of the Titanic. , p. 11.

19Enzensberger, (The Sinking of the Titanic, p. 58. Even here, Enzensberger permits a certain
ambivalence about what is actually lost. According to the rationalist
philosophy of the engineer on board, for example, popular attempts to equate
personal loss with the end of the world are misplaced.

34Enzensberger, ‘A Game of Hide and Seek’, unpublished paper
read to the International P.E.N. Club, in Stockholm, I978. A copy was submitted
by Enzensberger to the editor of the British literary magazine, Rialto, and extracts were used to accompany several of his poems.
See Rialto, 3, Summer I985, p. I9. I am grateful to the editor for the
oppor­tunity to read through the complete manuscript.

40The title of a supplementary poem in Enzensberger, The Sinking of the
Titanic, p. 30.

41See Enzensberger, ‘Unentwegter
Versuch, einem New Yorker Publikum die Geheim­nisse der deutschen Demokratie zu
erklären’, Kursbuch 56, I979, p.I3. In a late essay, Foucault also discusses just this
dialectic of social control as part of the history of polic­ing. See Foucault,
‘The Political Technology of Individuals’, in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman,
Patrick H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self (London, I988), pp. 45-62.

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